Review retracted due to horrid service Oct 2013 where hamachi had major issues and took our remote access solution down.

Little bit of background on how I found and came to try / use Hamachi...

After meeting one of the guys fromLogMeInat aSpiceCorps UK event for the second time and being impressed by the talk and the price of the LogMeIn central I started using it for remote support. I even did a review about it over here. It is a great product and I have come to heavily use it across a fair few machines.

One day I then had the requirement to setup a Site-To-Site VPN, after fighting for days and getting no where with IPSec subnet VPN’s. It was giving me stupid error messages and looks like the connection on the other network wasn’t strong/good enough to work with it right. Packets got dropped it didn’t stay up when it came up was just a PAIN.

After having a hunt around I came across the Hamachi product and already having a full log me in Central license / subscription I was able to jump straight in and use it without paying more, which was GREAT. A free product off the back of a relatively cheap paid for one.

I started to install it, all was going well it went on and it looked to be working but I couldn’t get the network to enable so I called support... Ok I’m not going to go into the full rant I had (you can read that here) but ill dive in a little as to what happened...

Phoned up for some quick help, 30 mins into the phone call (10 on hold) I found the fix myself and everything seemed to start working again, it said it was connected and I could ping across it.

This was done on a test machine, new product, production machine... NO THANKS. After this quick test I was confident enough to roll it onto the real machines I was going to use.

One went on find and worked great the other had a problem setting up the network. Back onto the phone 5 mins waiting on hold, 3 mins with one guy to get put to another 2 mins with that guy and two commands later everything was working! YAY

25 mins after being on the phone finally got told I picked the wrong type of network for my needs, rather than gateway I should have picked a mesh and that they couldn’t help me more than that as if I wanted to do a site to site it involed my routers and switches and that I was on my own... Meh ok I’ll muddle though it...

Off i trot/sit and crack on. After a little bit of playing around and changing some settings I finally worked it all out. You can checkout my how-to on how I did this if your intrested.

Now its all up and running and I can ping / communicate both ways lets see what happens when I restart machines... Restart one of them, it comes online and without even logging in the VPN came up. Restart both of them... The VPN comes up :-D

WOW is all I could say at this point, no matter what I throw at it as soon as the Internet was up on both ends it connected.

While the support was / is a little bit touch and go with LogMeIn I can’t fault either of the two products I have tried. Getting Hamachi setup was a little harder than I hoped but now its up and running I’m so glad I stuck with it.

On a slightly dodgy connection it still holds up and as soon as possible will reconnect without question or hesitation.

You can also manage a few bits of the client remotely meaning that if you set this up on lots of sites it would be nice and simple to change networks around or fix remote problems.

I think I’ve wittered on for long enough now, so ill leave you with one last thought... If I had to do this again or setup another site-to-site VPN I would pick Hamachi hands down.

P.S. I can declare LogMeIn have not asked me to do this, its done off my own back as I think its a great product. Well apart from the support its a good product.

Also sorry about the spealing its never been my thing, I did try but as always I failed... If you’ve seen me around the community you will know this by now :-P

5 Replies

Just read your review again, I think i looked at it when you did it, then looked at what was involved in the How-To and said, nuh-uh.

Of course In wasn't able to set up a Site to site VPN between our two sites Sonicwall firewalls either until I used LMI to control a machine on each end logged into the firewalls. At that point it really was simple, can't believe I didn't push and get it done sooner.

I started the trial on Hamachi as you did, and just had a heck of a time with it. I was to the point of having to call support when I said forget it. If it was going to be this much of a pain just to get working then there has to be something better.

I ended up with OpenVPN. What a great product. The setup on that was simple, straight forward, and worked right the first time. I even paid the $50 to license it for 10 simultaneous users.

Too bad that they cannot get the Hamachi product to work right when you first set it up. In the end I still got a great VPN for my out of office users.

I just set up Hamachi for use on our network. Just remote access for a couple of my users. I have to say that I didn't have any problems with it. Works very well in the limited scope we are using it in.

Hamachi is the simplest vpn solution to roll out and the easiest to maintain. Without even reading any literature on their website I was able to figure out how to roll this out to several clients in a Mesh configuration. I am not trying to stir the pot but I don't see how it's possible for somebody to say Openvpn is easier to rollout vs Hamachi? That's completely impossible.

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